Posted on 05/03/2016 2:41:37 PM PDT by Celerity
Depending on whom you ask, Facebook is either the savior or destroyer of journalism in our time. An estimated 600 million people see a news story on Facebook every week, and the social network’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has been transparent about his goal to monopolize digital news distribution.
Facebook’s stranglehold over the traffic pipe has pushed digital publishers into an uneasy alliance with the $350 billion behemoth, and the news business has been caught up in a jittery debate about what, precisely, the company’s intentions are. Will it swallow the business whole, or does it really just want publishers to put neat things in users’ news feeds? For its part, Facebook—which has recently begun paying publishers including Buzzfeed and the New York Times to post a quota of Facebook Live videos every week—bills its relationship with the media as a mutually beneficial landlord-tenant partnership.
But if you really want to know what Facebook thinks of journalists and their craft, all you need to do is look at what happened when the company quietly assembled some to work on its secretive “trending news” project. The results aren’t pretty: According to five former members of Facebook’s trending news team—“news curators” as they’re known internally—Zuckerberg & Co. take a downright dim view of the industry and its talent. In interviews with Gizmodo, these former curators described grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secretive, imperious culture in which they were treated as disposable outsiders. After doing a tour in Facebook’s news trenches, almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook’s algorithm.
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmodo.com ...
Facebook claims to have these incredible algorithms that put content in front of you that you need to see, or want to see.
One of the things has been the slant and bias of news on Facebook. This article explains that their "algorithm's" dirty little secret is that it's actually a room full of people.
These people tell you what to think and what to see. They control it all - without oversight.
They lied, in a nutshell. They lied. And they are told to keep their presence at Facebook as "ultra-secret" with enough division between the contractors and management to allow plausible deniability.
I thought that facebook was getting way to intrusive so I dropped it simply by not using it tbey don’t even email me now. I get most of my news here at FR and stay ahead of the MSM by a day or two.
I actually got kicked off of Facebook last week.
I “hacked” a way to make my name a single word (Of course... Celerity). You can still find my page there as Celerity. I have the frog icon.
Anyway, I changed my name to that single word and I got a threat 2 weeks later. They said that they will “allow” my new name if I send them a photo of my ID with that as my name
No. I’ll be DAMNED if some stupid webpage demands to see my ID. Not gonna happen.
It’s all about marketing. And they don’t even give the option to pay your way and skip their program - at any price.
Either way, I had 150 friends up there. All people I know in real life. They said they would catch up with me but basically I haven’t heard from anyone in a week.
Facebook is an addiction. It’s been created to trigger addiction receptors in the brain. And I was addicted - I didn’t quit facebook, they threw me off.
So all of those people that I talked to everyday haven’t responded to emails, phone calls, texts, nothing. It’s like I’m an exile.
(You can also look up my “Exile of Celerity” on facebook where I talk in depth on the topic)
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